Free Aim High by Tanni Grey-Thompson Page B

have time to feel sorry for anyone, let alone herself – life was just too busy.
    Some people, however, seem to think that wheelchair users are somehow different from ordinary people, and that we don’t deserve privacy in the same way. These people think they have an automatic right to ask wheelchair users any question they like. If I had a pound for every person who has stopped me in the street and said ‘So, what’s wrong with you, then?’ I would be a rich woman! Another favourite is, ‘So, are you confined to your wheelchair, then’, to which I have replied, ‘Yes, I usually sleep in it!’ My humour is not always appreciated. But what most people want to know is how I came to be a wheelchair user. Most tend to assume that something a lot more dramatic than a congenital birth defect must have caused it. It almost feels as if they would like the cause to be something more romantic.
    Some of these people are just plain nosey, but there are others who seem to think that a disabled person doesn’t have any feelings, and is obliged to answer questions from complete strangers. These encounters have never made me feel particularly uncomfortable, but I haven’t always answered the questions.
    If I had had a different upbringing – if I had not had positive people around me, not fought to go into mainstream school – I don’t think I would have been able to deal with my situation so well.
    If people have low expectations for disabled people – in fact, if they have low expectations for any young people – this has an effect on what the young people are able to do later on in life. Some youngsters manage to rise above it, but too many young people with disabilities grow up believing that they cannot achieve, because the people around them don’t believe it.
    I remember at school one careers teacher told me that I should go to secretarial college and learn to type, because people in wheelchairs became receptionists! I didn’t listen to that – when I told him that I wanted to go to university he told me that I was probably wasting my time as it wouldn’t help me get a job!
    If there was one thing that I could change, then it would be for young disabled people to naturally assume that they have a right to do everything their non-disabled counterparts are doing. Not, as is so often the case now, to assume that there is a whole pile of things that they will never do.
    In the UK we like to attach labels to people, and more often than not we define and judge people by the job that they do, or the level they reach within that job. Because of this, disabled people lose out. Many people look at impairment and the first thing they think of is what cannot be achieved. If we consider that a person with a disability has no status, because they are limited in what they can do, this can set the tone for the relationship.
    As an athlete I have spent the best part of the last twenty years trying to be the best that I can. Being an athlete has been what I have wanted to do for almost as long as I can remember, but there are many other labels that people could attach to me. I could be a mother, an athlete, a woman, a graduate – many things. But there was one thing that I was sure about when I was growing up – I didn’t want to be labelled as disabled.

CHAPTER TWO
    Getting Started in Sport
    Competing for Britain had always been my ambition but, in the early years, I actually wanted to play basketball. I didn’t think athletics was very exciting. It didn’t help that disability sport had a very limited profile in the mid-1980s. To my mind there were two people, both Welsh, who did an incredible amount of work to change this. They were John Harris and Chris Hallam, and they were something of a double act. Chris came across as brash, while John was quietly humorous. I remember watching a documentary on them and their sporting careers (I was only just